I've been
trying to figure out why this is the case. Something a female friend said
made sense: "Women are catty." Whether it's nature or nature,
it tends to be true with many women.
In elementary
school and junior high, I was betrayed time and again by female friends.
In some cases, they decided I wasn't "cool" enough, so they
abandoned me in their search for popularity, sometimes turning on me and
mercilessly picking on me.
In other
cases, they threw me over in pursuit of a guy.
So I learned
to be more selective of the female friends I chose, and to grow close
only to those who seemed to have eluded the "cattiness" gene.
Another
problem with female friends is that maintaining a friendship with them
is a lot like dating: you have to "court" them, in a sense,
by coming up with special things to do together. It's too much damn work!
And whether
it was the way I was brought up or something inherent in my personality,
I never got excited about "normal" girl things like horses or
makeup. I never liked swapping outfits (they're my clothes!); I hate putting
up my hair.
In short,
I've never been a "girlie girl" and I find them boring.
So my closest
female friends have been like me: somewhat unconventional, independent
thinkers with a sense of humor. I would rather hang out with Janeane Garafolo
than with Julia Roberts. Janeane and I would probably make fun of Julia.
Guy friends
don't make you court them. You call them up or you don't, and they don't
take offense. They are also far more likely to want to talk about movies
and politics than about, say, pedicures.
The only
time it's not fun being one of the guys is when they start checking out
women. And no matter what kind of guys you hang around, even if they're
non-conventional like most of my guy friends, this eventually happens.
If you hang around with the guys long enough, they forget you're not actually
one of them. The best solution, I've found, is to start loudly remarking
on the waiter's cute butt.
Of course,
we women can be much worse in a similar situation. Stick a man alone in
a room full of women and he'll soon hear about every bad thing about men:
"present company excepted, of course." I think it has something
to do with asserting our power in a male dominated world. Or maybe because
we hope he'll go back and tell all the other guys, "They're onto
us! We've got to change!"
Close female
friends are the best for talking about personal matters. For example,
they understand when you tell them you feel bloated and that you just
ate a pint of ice cream while crying over your college pictures. Guys
don't know how to react; they get all uncomfortable and turn red and make
a joke to change the subject. Sometimes it's fun to mention personal things
to them just for this reaction.
I accidentally
watched a couple of minutes of "The Other Half" last week while
in between my 8-minute abs tape and my kickboxing aerobics tape. They
were saying they didn't understand women who had mostly guy friends, and
they assumed there must be something pathological behind it, some secret
Freudian motive.
Clearly,
none of the guys on "The View" would qualify to be one of my
guy friends. They sounded almost like "girlie girls." I bet
they braid each other's hair during the commercial breaks.
Seriously,
there's nothing more annoying to me than people who conform to outdated
gender stereotypes. Just like the women I hang out with don't spend all
their time talking about hair and makeup, the guys I befriend don't spend
their days worrying about who's going to win the Super Bowl.
If they
ever do start talking about such things, I just ask them if I look bloated
and they get all nervous and change the subject.
Moral:
Gender
stereotypes are overrated.
Copyright
2003 by Alyce Wilson
Musings
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